There is, of course, no better time to shoot pictures (i prefer “make” pictures) than when the sun is on the deck… You only have a few minutes and you need to explain this to your clients… it’s not negotiable.. there is only a 20 to 40 minute window.

I was keeping my eye on the sun for almost an hour. Then it was time. They were not to happy that I made them get up from dinner to make this photo… but they liked it after they saw it…. This was a first place photo for me wherever I entered it.

This photo, when published in 1936 from a farm workers camp in Nipomo ( a few miles south of San Luis Obispo) motivated the government to send a shipment of 20,000 pounds of food into the area to feed the farm workers who were starving. Response time was 3 days. Compare that to 2007-2008 FEMA.

The 2006 photo got the city council and the cops to force the people to move away… as a nuisance and health hazard… and a criminal threat to the well to do neighborhood where the tent city was located… on purpose I might add.

DOROTHEA LANGE

A Life Beyond Limits

By Linda Gordon

Illustrated. 536 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $35

Gordon expertly analyzes the political culture of Depression-era California, where the enormous power of big agriculture kept tens of thousands of landless workers in peonage and despair. She portrays Lange as an ambivalent radical, deeply sympathetic to the plight of the migrants yet uncomfortable with the chaos that social conflict inevitably produced. Early in the Depression, Lange had tried but failed to photograph the labor protests that shook San Francisco. “Much of the action was so fast-moving and so violent that slow-moving Lange could not or would not get close,” Gordon writes. “This was the territory of the new breed of adventurous photojournalists.” Lange’s talent lay elsewhere.

Gordon is more in tune with the politics of Paul Taylor, who believed in organized protest to redress economic grievances, than she is with Lange’s more passive approach. A portrait photographer at heart, Lange stressed the inner emotions of those facing injustice and deprivation. “Her documentary photography was portrait photography,” Gordon says. “What made it different was its subjects, and thereby its politics.” An individualist at heart, Lange provided an alternative to the photography of wretchedness, which centered on the misery of beaten-down victims, as well as to the Popular Front mythology, which showed earnest, well-muscled men and women laboring together in fields and factories to produce a Soviet-style paradise on earth. Lange saw America as a worthy work in progress, incomplete and capable of better. By portraying her subjects as nobler than their current conditions, she emphasized the strength and optimism of our national character. She became, in Gordon’s words, “America’s pre-eminent photographer of democracy.”

But not for long. Though Lange would go on to photograph the dehumanizing process of Japanese-American internment during World War II and produce a number of elegant spreads for Life magazine, her unique brand of photojournalism — dignified, personal, contemplative — was overwhelmed by the action of wartime photography and the more abstract avant-garde imagery to come. In some ways, Lange, who died in 1965, remains frozen in the ’30s — a relic of the Depression and the enormous creative energy it unleashed. But even a glance at “Migrant Mother” reminds us of the timelessness of her best work. “A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera,” she liked to say. Gordon’s elegant biography is testament to Lange’s gift for challenging her country to open its eyes.

As a Public Relations campaign, the Vegas tourism office brought some “showgirls” to Seattle for photo meet ups at various locations for a couple days…

One of my favorite photos of all time is the incongruent, bizarre view of these two waaay overly (or underly) dressed women catching the Seattle Times sports page in the morning at Cafe Umbria, in Seattle.

As you can see we also went to a bar and hooked up with some other folks too.

Unfortunately there is this belief that just because a file is digital it’s ready to go right out of the camera… not true. Same is true from film scans… which is where this photo originates (21/4 film scanned to 65 megabytes).

Before:

After:

And by the way… This finished version was entered into two different photography judging competitions… It scored a very low score in one and first place in the other.

So don’t give up if the world doesn’t see it your way. Perhaps they weren’t even looking.

I made this with a 110mm macro lens on a 21/4 Bronica with Portra 160NC. f22 at 1/125th of a second. Two strobes and a foam core reflector helped out. One strobe was in a soft box strip about 14 inches by 30 inches and the other light was in a 16 inch dish painted white, with a sock over it.